Staff Software Engineer, AI Search
Databricks · Mountain View, California · Engineering · listed June 4, 2026
The shape of it
Seniority
Staff
Experience asked
10+ years
Where
Hybrid
Stated pay
$166,000 – $225,000 USD
Requirements listed
9
Length
825 words
In the posting’s own words
As a Staff Engineer for Search, you’ll play a critical role in building and scaling our next-generation Search product — spanning Vector Search, Keyword Search, and Search Quality. You’ll drive the design and evolution of a highly-performant, cost-efficient, and developer-friendly Search stack that enables customers to build AI applications with accuracy, speed, and scale. Beyond hands-on contributions, you’ll help define the long-term vision, mentor senior engineers, collaborate across teams, and lead strategic efforts that expand the technical and business impact of Search at Databricks.
What it asks for · 9
- 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
- Deep expertise in Search technologies (vector, keyword, hybrid) and related domains such as indexing, ranking, retrieval infrastructure, and relevance optimization.
- Familiarity with storage systems, recommendation engines, and database internals.
- Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and system design as applied to large-scale retrieval and data systems.
- Proven ability to deliver technically complex, high-impact initiatives that create customer or business value.
- Experience leading architecture for performance-sensitive, large-scale systems.
- Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across teams in fast-moving environments.
- Strategic and product-oriented mindset with the ability to align technical execution with long-term vision.
- Passion for mentoring, growing engineers, and fostering technical excellence.
What the job covers
- Drive the architecture and evolution of the Search product, delivering scalable, low-latency, and high-quality retrieval across massive multimodal datasets.
- Identify and solve challenges in indexing, storage, query execution, and ranking — blending innovations in vector search, keyword search, and hybrid retrieval techniques.
- Partner with infrastructure, product, and research teams to shape APIs and developer experiences that make it easy to build production-grade, AI-powered and search-driven applications.
- Lead end-to-end engineering efforts — from design to production rollout — ensuring high standards for performance, correctness, and reliability.
- Make direct, high-impact contributions to core systems powering search, discovery, and recommendation experiences.
- Champion software engineering excellence and mentor other engineers through design reviews, technical discussions, and collaborative development.
- Contribute to long-term planning and influence Databricks’ technical direction in search, AI infrastructure, and data systems.
Tools and skills named
Data
- Databricks3×
Cloud & infra
- Distributed systems
Ways of working
- Mentorship
Words the posting leans on
- search16×
- systems8×
- data7×
- retrieval6×
- technical5×
- customers4×
- design4×
- engineers4×
- experience4×
- infrastructure4×
- vector4×
- building3×
- business3×
- hybrid3×
- large-scale3×
- recommendation3×
Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.
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